adopted August 2026
Chicago. Near the geographic center of the city sits the largest jail in the country, Cook County Jail (CCJ). Despite much-celebrated reforms, every day thousands of people rot inside CCJ, nearly all Black and Latino. Inside CCJ, or what those held captive inside call Hell on Earth, the population is fed rotten food, forced to breathe mold and bacteria, denied basic medical care, and subjected to the whims of sadistic guards. That same complex houses the main criminal court for Cook County, which serves to do everything but administer justice, dehumanizing everyone who walks through its doors.
Just outside of CCJ is Little Village, the predominately Mexican neighborhood that was flooded in fall 2025 with the ICE/CBP Gestapo, who terrorized the neighborhood, brutalizing and kidnapping with impunity, aided and abetted by the killer pigs of the Chicago Police Department (CPD). While politicians and nonprofits used the ICE occupation to grandstand and score points, people who actually stood up to ICE are still facing prosecution and persecution at the hands of the State’s Attorney. At the north end of Little Village is the Albany Terrace CHA senior building, one of the last public housing buildings still remaining in Chicago. In Albany on January 3rd, 2025, a man stricken with cancer and having a mental health crisis named Timothy Glaze was shot 16 times by the killer pigs of CPD.
Chicago’s progressive union-backed mayor, Brandon Johnson, has never once said the name Timothy Glaze in public, much less used his power as mayor to discipline the pigs who gunned him down. In fact, under “progressive” governance in Chicago and Cook County, the CPD and suburban police departments have been given a license to kill with impunity. Neither Johnson nor the do-nothing police oversight boards have taken any meaningful action to rein in police brutality and murder, or CPD cooperation with ICE. In fact, Johnson has routinely increased funding for the CPD, and since killer cop Jason Van Dyke was locked up for the murder of Laquan McDonald, no cops in Chicago have ever faced trial for killing people.
These repressive apparatuses—the police, the jails, the court system—are in place to repress and control a potentially rebellious population: the Black, Latino, immigrant, and other masses who make up the proletariat, dispossessed of any means to make wealth. Across this region, we find millions of proletarians: warehoused in Cook County Jail, slaving away in the lowest rungs of the legal and illegal economy, as health care workers or warehousing and delivering packages for Amazon and other tech monopolies, being forced to crisscross the region in search of minimum wage service jobs, or locked out of any kind of work altogether. With the shuttering of the factories that employed proletarians for decades, the destruction of public housing, and the rise of gentrification, the proletariat is being pushed out of Chicago, relocating further into the suburbs where they are subject to new forms of oppression and are governed by comical levels of corruption.
In tandem with state repression, ideological state apparatuses stamp out resistance. Through mass media and technology, the masses are flooded with reactionary messages, trying to convince people that their real problem is with other oppressed groups like immigrants, or just poisoning people’s brains with algorithms. In politics, people are beaten down with messages that the only way anything can change is through the ballot box. In Chicago, that means a “choice”: the current administration, nauseating parasites who have long made their peace with police brutality and real-estate capital, killing people and driving the rest into homelessness, debt, and despair, or the slash-and-burn capitalists, who see every public asset as an opportunity to make more money for finance capital and its endless pursuit of profit.
Chicago. A political system that offers no choice at all. Factories closed, public housing destroyed, the proletariat increasingly gentrified out of the city, locked up, and hunted down in the struggle for daily survival. Women facing criminal cases for defending themselves against abusers, while killer cops walk free. What is all of this in place to serve? The larger system that runs this country, and the whole globe: capitalism-imperialism, a sinful and sinister way of organizing society that keeps one country, the US, dominant over the whole planet at the cost of millions of lives. That keeps white people dominant over the rest of society through racist and white supremacist institutions and ideas. That keeps men lording over women and trans people by recreating patriarchal institutions and structures from Christian fundamentalism to OnlyFans. And to keep one class, the bourgeoisie, the capitalist-imperialist ruling class, on top of everyone else.
That ruling class is driven by the endless need for profit above everything else to expand their reach, control markets, and gain access to raw materials and cheap human labor through imperialism. Both political parties, Republicans and Democrats, are committed at the highest levels to maintaining the current setup of the world, where they can plunder and murder at will, whether that’s murdering schoolgirls in Iran, plundering Puerto Rico, murdering fishers in the Caribbean, or joining with Israel in the genocide against Gaza. Their endless need for profits drives them to destroy the ecosystems that sustain all human life, from chopping down rain forests to graze cattle to building data centers that suck up water and electricity to pump out AI brainrot.
This is not a system that can be reasoned with, prayed away, or meaningfully reformed. There is only one solution: Revolution.
Revolutions do not just happen when enough people get mad enough, when the system screws enough people over, or even through large protests or strikes. Revolutions must be made by masses of people consciously acting to make them. Blocks United Revolutionary Network (BURN) exists to make revolution. For two years, we have been organizing together as Dare to Struggle, getting to know the families of people killed by the police, learning about the conditions inside CCJ, and agitating from one corner of the city to the other. We’ve been on the front lines confronting the ICE Gestapo and the CPD, and taken our lumps in the process. Now we’re applying the lessons we’ve learned in the last two years and dedicating ourselves to bringing forward the subjective forces for revolution, the organized forces that will make it happen. We will continue to stand with the masses of people, investigating their conditions and ways of thinking, and standing with them, from the inmates locked up in CCJ, to the women who defend themselves from their abusers, to the people under the boot of the CPD.
In practice that means going to the masses of people, learning from them, and bringing them forward in class struggle against their own oppression and exploitation, and against all of the ways that the system bears down on people. Fuck “stay in your lane,” serve the people! We intend to sharpen our knives as agitators and propagandists, so that we can continually expose all of the crimes of this system, from Chicago to South Lebanon to Alvarado. We know from our own bitter experiences that a thousand forces act on people to keep the righteous fights that people wage trapped inside the confines of this system. It’s right to rebel against reactionary pigs, and it’s right to rebel against the goons who serve reactionaries, whether it’s with grant funding, the ballot box, or neon safety vests hoping to hold back the people’s rage against the system. We stand with the defiant ones, and are committed to pushing and diverting struggles in the most militant direction against the system.
Through all of our work, we will continually train ourselves in revolutionary theory, soaking up all we can from the great revolutions of the past in all their stunning successes and shortcomings, and studying and popularizing the communist journal Going Against the Tide. We are fighting for a world where the masses of people have power to dictate how society is run, where all people can live full and dignified lives, and where the people can collectively root out all forms of exploitation and oppression. We expect every member of BURN to be engaged in study and rigorous summation of our work, and to constantly raise our political level and that of the people we are leading. We charge our whole organization and ourselves as individuals to strive every day to live up to the name Revolutionary.
burn chicago 